Photograph Source: World Economic Forum – CC BY 3.0

Eleven Republican members of Congress recently sent a letter to the director of national intelligence and the USDA’s director of homeland security, expressing their concern China was pulling away from the United States in the field of biotechnology, specifically as it relates to cultivated meat. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from animal cells, without slaughter.

“We request that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the USDA Office of Homeland Security coordinate to conduct a focused analysis on the potential implications of China’s advancements in innovative protein technologies,” the letter said. “We seek your recommendations on strategic measures the United States should consider to ensure continued leadership and resilience in this critical sector.”

This represents a marked shift from prior Republican engagement with the field of cellular agriculture. Over the past year, a handful of Republican-controlled states have preemptively banned the new protein, while a number of others are considering similar measures. Meanwhile, even some conservative Democrats, like Senator John Fetterman, have expressed support for such bans.

I’m an advocate for a massive increase in public funding for cultivated-meat research. My prime motivation is I see the technology as the most promising means of reducing animal suffering and premature death. That said, I frequently employ a variety of other arguments to advance this policy goal. These include highlighting the potential environmental and public health benefits of cultivated meat.

At times, I’ve tried to use nationalist anxiety to garner support for the technology. For instance, I’ve written letters to newspapers in which I discussed China including cultivated meat in its five-year plan, and worried aloud about the United States being left behind. As an internationalist, I always feel guilty about this. Increasing the saliency of nationalism is bad in a host of ways.

Perhaps most obviously, it increases the risk of war. Military conflict is terrible for humans, and, as an animal advocate, I believe it’s terrible for our fellow creatures. I suppose you could make a contrarian, misanthropic case that in destroying human life and infrastructure, the world might improve for animals, but I don’t think that’s actually true and wouldn’t support it if it was.

That said, I think activists have to approach the world as it is, not as they want it to be. Nationalism remains a source of motivation for many. Further, I’m aware much technological advancement has been inspired by nationalist anxiety. The Space Race is an excellent example of this. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union competed to achieve space-flight superiority.

Similarly, when it comes to social progress, some academics believe the struggle for African-American civil rights during roughly the same period was as successful as it was in part because the Soviet Union was using the existence of America’s Jim-Crow system in propaganda against the United States. Our government acquiesced to a greater degree than it might have, if not for Cold War.

All of which is to say, I’m not sure how I feel about using nationalist anxiety to advance cellular agriculture. I imagine there’s a way to do it that’s relatively benign and I’d like to think that’s what I’ve done. I know all political strategies involve some degree of moral compromise. Still, it makes me uncomfortable, especially as global politics seem increasingly unstable, to deliberately stoke national tensions.

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